Audio By Carbonatix
Denver was a ghost town on New Year’s Eve, with cops everywhere, revelers in short supply and nary an official firework. Not exactly the things you’d associate with a supposed world-class city. But there was one honest-to-God party in the Mile High City that night. It was over at the Mercury Cafe, where more than one hundred tango dancers spent the night making fireworks with their feet, burning up the hardwood. When the last couple walked out, the clock read 8:30 a.m.
That’s more like it.
“No other state in the country has what we have here on Friday nights,” says tango instructor Gabriela Carone. What she’s referring to is Colorado’s ever-growing tango scene and, in the Mercury Cafe, Denver’s best place to showcase it. The Merc’s upstairs dance hall is well-suited to a milonga, or tango party: It’s dark but not oppressively so, and the barn-like roof and hanging lights with their fans impart a timeless atmosphere. Chairs and tables ring the dance floor on three sides, and the place feels smoky and slow. Couples move around like petals on water. Early on, dancers have ample room to practice, talk over moves or just glide by. But by 10:30 or so, the dance-floor real estate shrinks as more tangueros and tangueras arrive.
Carone, a philosophy professor at CU and the only Argentine tango instructor in town, describes the Merc as the closest place she’s found to the “deliberately marginal atmosphere” of a milonga back home. The tango, she explains, was born in darkness, in the bordellos of turn-of-the-century Buenos Aires; the melancholy and jealous passions of those who first danced it still suffuse the experience. With the blues, it shares hard-luck stories of love and loss, as well as the potential for catharsis. The difference? With tango, release comes only when you move your feet.
Thanks to a small but absolutely obsessed cadre of practitioners, Denver has welcomed internationally known instructors and dancers to town — everyone from elder Argentine masters Nito and Elba Garcia to up-and-comers Omar Vega and German tango star Brigitta Winkler, as well as American Daniel Trenner, who is largely credited with jump-starting tango across the United States and in Colorado.
Tango Fridays kicked off at the Merc three years ago, at a time when owner Marilyn Megenity, tired of featuring just live bands, says she was “really looking for something beautiful.” The crowd is mostly older; there aren’t too many hipsters in there, but the dancers conduct themselves with style and panache.
The Merc’s milongas kicked into overdrive this past weekend when the club hosted three days of tango accompanied by a live eight-piece orchestra, the largest such group assembled in Denver. For years couples danced to old Astor Piazolla albums, but the growing number of tango musicians is perhaps the biggest success story for Colorado’s tango community. The bandonion, as indispensable to tango as the guitar is to rock and roll, is “sort of a crossword puzzle of an instrument,” says Boulder musician Evan Orman, which explains why only about twelve people in the United States — including him — play the thing with any skill. The instrument is somewhere between a concertina, an accordion and a typewriter; its sound is old-fashioned and profoundly unexpected, the aural equivalent of watching your parents kiss passionately. But like the dance itself, it eventually proves beguiling.
Learning to dance the tango isn’t much easier than playing it, but fortunately, members of the local scene are accessible and warm. Lessons at the Merc start at 7 p.m. for beginners and at 8 for intermediate learners; the milonga is in full swing from 9 until past midnight. Experienced dancers are encouraged to prove their talents by helping beginners — and in tango, you can do one basic move well and feel like a real man or woman of the world.
“I like the rhythm,” says Isabelle Marques, who took up the dance just four months ago and finds it “challenging,” “beautiful” and “elegant.”
But certainly, the tango is more than just a bunch of steps to learn. Those touched by the so-called tango trance wax grandiloquently about what sound like its supernatural powers. These fans can be forgiven their occasional forays into hyperbole, for it’s the only way the tango can really be rendered in words. The tango is a culture, a way of life, a mode of being. Unlike swing, which so often resembles a bunch of flailing limbs (who hasn’t almost been knocked out by dancers being thrown through the air?), the tango is like a meditation on movement itself.
For Carone, the dance is far beyond that. In a society that has mastered the double-edged art of competitive self-interest, it’s a subversive beachhead bringing a message of love and cooperation.
